


Flames of War

by squirenonny



Category: Cosmere - Brandon Sanderson, Stormlight Archive - Brandon Sanderson, Warbreaker - Brandon Sanderson
Genre: 31 Days of Sadfic, CFSWF, Gen, WoR spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-31
Updated: 2015-07-30
Packaged: 2018-04-12 04:31:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,772
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4465547
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/squirenonny/pseuds/squirenonny
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lightsong wasn't there.</p><p>Written for CFSWF 2015.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. God King

**Author's Note:**

  * For [fbstj](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=fbstj).



Lightsong isn’t there when Blushweaver dies, her throat slit by allies who fear she will turn on them. When her scarlet blood—ordinary blood—stains her pale blue dress and her copper skin with a life that proves to be just as fragile as any other.

He hears only later, once it’s too late to make a difference.

“I _was_ there,” he whispers, to himself, to Blushweaver. He’s not sure who he means the words for, except that he waits for Llarimar to leave. He doesn’t mean the confession to become an accusation. “I was there, and I heard you, but I left.” Left to find help, for once listening to his High Priest’s advice.

 _You’re no hero, Lightsong._ Scoot was right about that much. If Lightsong were a hero, he would have stayed and helped. Perhaps then Blushweaver would have lived.

He knows Llarimar blames himself, though, so Lightsong keeps these thoughts private.

“I couldn’t have done anything,” he tells Scoot a few hours after they discover the body. Long enough for the shock to fade, long enough that more pressing concerns than guilt (and more crushing guilts than this) have stolen his attention. “If you hadn’t been there to talk sense into me, I just would have died with her.”

The worst part is that he doesn’t know whether or not that’s a lie. There’s still a voice, Blushweaver’s voice, saying _What if?_

He can’t dwell on that for long, though. Blushweaver’s was not the only corpse found beneath the palace complex.

Susebron, the God King, is dead.

They find him with a sword through his heart, his eyes wide and frightened, his mouth open in a tongueless scream.

It explains so much, the missing tongue. The God King’s seclusion, his silence, his apparent disinterest in the looming war with Idris. Susebron was as much a puppet as any of them, and as mortal. None of it matters now, but Lightsong can’t help laughing over the irony.

The God King is dead, and with him a wealth of Breath, and Hallandren marches to war.

Less than an hour later they find the Queen, dead, the scene made up to look like a ritual sacrifice. It’s absurd, but in less than a day the rumor has spread to every corner of T’Telir and Idrian immigrants are stirring in outrage.

Without an heir, the Court of Gods falls apart, and Lightsong, as the only remaining Returned commanding an army—half an army—finds himself taking Susebron’s place. It’s laughable, making him God King, but no one argues. No one else wants to be God King over a nation at war.

Lightsong doesn’t want it either, but Hallandren burns in his dreams and he cannot stand aside. Nevertheless, he has very little to do with the actions that save his reign from an immediate, catastrophic failure.

Vivenna, the dead Queen’s sister, knows enough to see that the Pahn Kahl rebellion wants war, and that Hallandren is not to blame for Sisirinah’s death. She goes to the Idrians in T’Telir and argues peace, dampening rebellion before it starts in earnest, though she cannot stop them all. Idrian extremists kill Hallandren citizens, and Hallandren officers brutalize Idrians guilty of no more than grieving their dead princess, their dead Queen.

Vasher leads Lightsong’s army, catching the other half—once Blushweaver’s half—before it can enter Idris. He goes reluctantly, a curse on his lips and a bitter promise that after this, after this he is done with war.

While his new allies quell the war building on two fronts, Lightsong bends his newfound power to stopping the last of the Pahn Kahl rebellion. Their mercenaries are already dead or gone, too shrewd to stay and die in their employer’s coup. Lightsong rallies the other Returned and their priests and their guards and stop them before they can raise more trouble.

A few weeks of peace follow.

Vivenna hardly sleeps for her work reassuring her people that they are safe, that those who killed her sister have not gone unpunished. Vasher returns with the remnants of an army, a scant two hundred Lifeless, and prepares to depart in search of old _friends_.

Llarimar tells Lightsong, in those few peaceful weeks, who he once was. An accountant. The Court of Gods has made an accountant their King on the eve of another Manywar. For all his wit and irreverence, even Lightsong could not tell as fine a joke.

Lightsong has little time to appreciate the cosmic irony. The king of Idris arrives with an army of his own, claiming vengeance for his daughters—one dead, one lost. T’Telir, shaken, cracking, without its rightful king and without its Lifeless army, lies helpless before a father’s rage.

Desperate, Lightsong goes to Vasher.

“I told you, I’m done with war,” he says, tossing his coal-black blade into a bundle with the rest of his scant possessions.

Lightsong laughs, wondering when this became his life, this arguing in favor of violence. “I need you,” he says. “I don’t know what I’m doing.”

Vasher looks at him, something like pity in his eyes. “Then you’re already better than most kings who find themselves at war.”

A whisper reaches them.

A whisper draws Vasher back to the war.

Whispers of a princess, holding Breath beyond her own, her hair a streak of crimson zeal, her clothes bright ostentation.

Vivenna stands between her father and T’Telir and begs him to understand, to choose peace. He calls her an imposter, a heretic, an insult to the memories of the daughters he’s come to avenge.

Lightsong and Vasher arrive too late to stop the sword that cuts her down where she stands, unwavering in her defense of a city she once called her enemy.

She falls, and Vasher is there to catch her.

“I tried,” she whispers, her breath an uneven gasp. “I tried.”

“Don’t.” Vasher closes his eyes against the army streaming past them into T’Telir. Smoke rises from the first line of homes. Already people are screaming. Another war, another slaughter. Vasher is so tired of it all and he knows, he _knows_ , that he will leave only more death in his wake. Even if he brings peace, he fears the cost.

Vivenna is young and naïve, but she, too, wants peace, and Vasher wonders if the world really needs Warbreaker the Peaceful to return.

“There’s an army,” Vasher says to Lightsong, who watches in horror as Hallandren begins to burn. He doesn’t turn as Vasher tells him of Kalad’s Phantoms, _his_ Phantoms, and how to command them.

Lightsong doesn’t turn, but his hands become fists at his side and he stands a little taller and his eyes are as hard as any commander in the first Manywar.

Vasher leans over Vivenna one hand on her forehead, and listens to her labored breathing. _Be better than I was_.

“My life to yours,” he says, exhaling. “My Breath become yours.”

Vivenna opens her eyes to the flames of war, to her people’s screams. She looks down on Vasher’s corpse, drained of color, and closes her eyes in a fleeting prayer. She will mourn him later, as she will mourn her sister later, as she will mourn all the dead and dying— _later_.

Vivenna has little Breath, Lightsong scarcely more—only what the priests were able to gather in the last few weeks, a few hundred to begin replacing the tens of thousands lost with Susebron. But they have an army of bone wrapped in granite.

Idris does not yield easily. Thousands die before the war ends, and fires rage across Hallandren. Only one thing finally stops the scattered army still raiding the countryside: the death of King Dedelin.

Vivenna knows it was the only way, but she never stops seeing her father’s blood on her hands. She takes Nightblood with her when she returns to Idris as Queen. Lightsong keeps Kalad’s Phantoms, now mere statues once more.

Neither ever speak the command phrases again. They live, and die, as the sole keepers of that secret.

Vivenna’s reign is unhappy, plagued by her people’s resentment and disgust. They know she held Breath, they know she fought on the side of Hallandren. (They don’t know how much she would give to be anywhere but in Idris for the last, short years of her life, but there is no one else who can reign. No one else, at least, she can trust not to start another war with Hallandren.)

But she was raised to duty, so she sees it through. History will see her reign as a dark stain on the royal line of Idris, but her legacy is peace. Though she dies young, there is no war for years afterward.

Her descendents tell stories of a deadly black blade, a blade that stood ever beside the throne of Queen Vivenna and vanished when she died. No one knows what became of it.

Lightsong steps down soon after Vivenna’s death, just three years after illness took his first High Priest. The world cannot know how much the God King wanted to save him, but Scoot made him swear on their shared blood that he would not.

So he lives on, waiting only for the priests to discover a Returned infant they can call Susebron’s heir. Not his blood heir; T’Telir knows too much by now to maintain that lie, but the people are willing to accept that the Iridescent Tones might have a grand purpose for Returning a child so young.

Lightsong is glad to retire, glad to live the peaceful life his priests have prepared for him away from the politics of the Gods.

He lives on borrowed Breath, waiting for the day he finds the person he was meant to heal, not knowing that man is already dead.


	2. Highprince

Years pass. Lifetimes fade.

A world away, three young men are born never hearing the name Lightsong the Bold.

Adolin Kholin, heir to the Kholinar princedom, is a dueling prodigy. He trains with the ardentia from a young age, learning to use the Shards he inherited from his mother’s family. He is bold and reckless and unorthodox, much to his tutor’s chagrin.

A perfect duelist, flawless in all ten classical forms, with a bit of his own flair thrown in from time to time.

(But this improvisation is unrefined. His swordmaster never taught him to throw his Blade. She didn’t teach him to wrestle, to distract. He figured out for himself when taunting helps and when it merely exacerbates, and he is not always correct in his judgments.)

Some years later Adolin’s younger brother, Renarin, gains a Blade and Plate of his own and comes to the ardentia seeking a master.

He is chosen, of course. The ardents wouldn’t dare refuse a Highprince's son outright, but they play their own games and Renarin is chosen by the least of them, though of course he doesn’t know it.

Adolin might have recommended another, but he never got on well with his master and he doesn’t pay enough attention to the other ardents to know an insult when he sees one.

(Renarin trains, of course, but his mentor begins where he would with a young lighteyed man gaining a Blade after a decade’s work with a steel imitation. Frustrated by his lack of progress, haunted by his Blade’s screams, stifled by Plate he neither trusts nor understands, Renarin gives up. He comes to train once a week, for the show of it, and leaves every week in tears.)

Kaladin Stormblessed, Captain of the King’s Guard, receives no offer of training. He is a darkeyes still branded with the glyphs of a slave, and the world would rather pretend he is not in the training grounds at all.

Only after the assassin, only after Kaladin convinces Dalinar that his men need practice, only after the Highprince intimidates the ardentia into complying—only then does a new and inexperienced ardent agree to spar with them, he with a wooden Blade, they with practice spears.

(They never hold a Blade themselves, never face one in combat, never learn the swordstances or receive any useful advice on how to counter them. Their time in the training grounds accomplishes less than what they would have learned in the same time in the chasms.)

Time rushes on, and the three young men are dragged along, ignorant of what they might have learned if they’d known a man who called himself Zahel.

Adolin duels.

After years adhering to his father’s prohibition on dueling in wartime, Adolin is unleashed on the other lighteyes. He wins duel after duel, and together with Shallan Davar plans a dramatic victory that will earn him a chance to challenge Sadeas.

Four-on-one was never winnable, and this Adolin is even less prepared. He fights, and when he tries to yield his gesture is beaten down.

Renarin enters the duel, Blade screaming in shaking hands. Adolin’s opponents use him as leverage, but even so Abrobadar’s first strike knocks the Blade from Renarin’s hand.

Cursing himself and lighteyes alike, Kaladin enters the arena and throws himself between the unarmed Renarin and Abrobadar.

A Blade swings for his neck, and he sees friends die, sees the Assassin in White, sees a Parshendi on a bloody battlefield. Kaladin has not trained against a Blade, has not tempered his panic.

His mind freezes, and instinct takes over. The same instinct that let Szeth’s Blade sever his arm. Only this time, it’s not just an arm that his spear fails to protect.

Kaladin’s eyes burn.

Adolin is left to fight three foes and Renarin, unarmed, has no options.

He takes in Stormlight.

Abrobadar panics, forgets he is only supposed to keep Renarin under pressure.

And Renarin’s eyes burn.

In the stands, Dalinar roars. He forgets about the rules of the arena, the limitations on a disadvantaged duel. He no longer cares about Sadeas, about justice, about his grand plans. The Highprinces with their schemes and their apathy can burn in the pits of Damnation itself. Elhokar tries to hold his uncle back, but the Blackthorn cannot let his son’s murder go unpunished.

His feet have barely touched the sand when Relis cuts him through.

His eyes burn, the tears still wet on his cheeks.

The judge no longer pretends not to see Adolin’s gesture of surrender. She looks him straight in the eye and says nothing as the beating begins.

Four-on-one.

Simple punishment.

When it is over, Adolin is allowed to live, though his sword arm and both legs are gray from Shardblade cuts. His house—what remains of it—loses every Shard it had. Sadeas has lost the last scrap of Elhokar’s trust, but he counts it a small price to pay to take the Blackthorn off the field.

He doesn’t realize the enemy he’s made of Highprince Adolin.

Though his disability bars him from the arena and from the battlefield, Adolin refuses to be caged. He is not his father, is not bound by his father’s honor.

And he _beats_ the Highprinces into submission. His rage turns on every lighteyes who sat by while Sadeas killed his father and his brother. He is not Dalinar, to play the lighteyes’ games, to maneuver and entice and seek agreement. He is not the Blackthorn, Blade in hand to enact the King’s will.

If anything, Adolin becomes like his uncle, a man who sends living weapons to crush rebellion and bring a kingdom to heel.

Shallan marries Adolin and reveals to him her secrets and spies for him, bringing word of plots and assassins, undercutting rebellion before it begins.

Moash abandons his plan to kill Elhokar, a final gesture of respect for his Captain and friend. He becomes instead Adolin’s Blade, an assassin known throughout Alethkar. He kills Sadeas first, for Adolin, and then Amaram, for Kaladin. Adolin grants him Oathbringer and Sadeas’s Plate to help in his service, and Moash spends the next two years killing those who oppose Adolin’s reign—in a duel if he must, in the night if he can.

The Princedoms are thrown into chaos, the Vengeance Pact forgotten.

While the flames of war ravage Alethkar, the Desolation arrives. Roshar meets it without the Bondsmith to unite her people, without the Truthwatcher to guide them, without the Windrunner to protect them. The Lightweaver and the Elsecaller fight and scour the planet for more like them, but they are too late.

Roshar burns.

Worlds away, Lightsong lives on, and waits. He’s lost track of how many years have passed since he was God King. And still he waits.

Waits for the man he was meant to save.


End file.
